“The Great Vowel Shift”

What it is

§ single name given to a series of sound changes

§ notice how giving a name to something makes it more real, e.g. poltergeist, post-traumatic stress syndrome

What it did

§ affected all long vowels in stresed syllables

o wasn’t ‘phonetically conditioned’

§ changed them from something like the sounds of mainland European languages (French useful point of reference for us) to the sounds they have now

§ raised the vowels that could be raised

o e.g. meet /e/ -> /i/

o e.g. lessee /i/, cf. Old French lessé /e/

§ diphthongized the ones that couldn’t go any further

o e.g. wise /i/ -> /ay/

o e.g. polite /i/->/ay/, cf. French poli /i/

Very broad outline

key words	ME	eModE	PDE
bite	i	ei or *i	ai
meet	e	i	i
meat	ε:	e	i
mate	α:	α: -> ε:	e
out	u	ou or *u	au
boot	o	u	u
boat	)	o	o

) = bore * = ‘schwa’

ME

i bite out u

e meet boot o

ε: meat boat )

α: mate

eModE

i meet boot u

e meat *i bite out * u boat o

ε:

æ: mate

PDE (some dialects)

i meet, meat boot u

e mate boat o

ai bite out au

What it explains

o why English long vowels differ from those in other languages

o why vowels of some loanwords differ from that of their source

o e.g. English employee /i/ vs French /e/

o variant English pronunciations of loanwords

o e.g. divorcee /e/ or /i/?

o e.g. viva /i/ or /ay/

o e.g. syllabi /i/ or /ay/

o chronology of loanwords (sometimes)

o e.g. were polite and oblige borrowed before police and machine?

o why English ‘short’ and ‘long’ vowels differ in quality as well as quantity, e.g. bit and bite, mat and mate

o inconsistencies in the GVS cause glitches in English spelling system

o why some words sound the same but are spelled differently, e.g. meat and meet

o why some words are spelled the same but are pronounced differently, e.g. meat and great

o some rhymes in older poetry

o on /e/: away, sea

o on /o/: come, room

o some dialect differences: GVS isn’t fully realized in all dialects

o Ireland: beat /e/, not /i/ (think of Yeats and Keats)

o Scotland: house, mouse /u/, not /au/

o Canada! stay tuned ...

Why it may have happened

Further reading:

Lass, Roger. The shape of English: structure and history. London: Dent,

1987. 129-131. [Short clear explanation; the book is a great account of

modern English from the historical point of view.]

Lass, Roger. “Phonology and morphology.” Volume 3 of The Cambridge

history of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP, 1999. 72-85. [A much more detailed linguistic account, including summaries of different theories.]

Smith, Jeremy. An historical study of English: function, form, and change.

London & New York: Routledge, 1996. 86-111. [Considers sociolinguistic factors, such as dialect contact in London.]

Linguistically

o was it a ‘pull’ chain?

o (i.e. the high vowels diphthongized, leaving room for the other ones to rise)

§ problem: in the north, /u/ didn’t diphthongize (Sc. house /u/)

o or a ‘push’ chain?

o (i.e. the mid vowels raised, pushing/diphthongizing the high vowels and creating a space for the lower vowels to rise)

§ more manuscript evidence for this

· esp very early spellings of <ou> for what had been ME /o/

§ doun ‘to do’, bloude ‘blood’

· only a bit later do you get <i> spellings for what had been ME /e/

o e.g. hyre ‘hear’, appyr ‘appear’

Sociolinguistically

o coexistence in London of different dialect speakers

o some distinguished /ε:/ and /e/ (e.g. meat and meet)

§ of these, some (higher-status speakers) also had even higher variants of /ε:/ and /):/ [in words showing lengthening in open syllables]

· vowels all got higher when the lower-status ones imitated the higher-status ones who tried further to differentiate themselves from them!

o some groups (e.g. East Anglians) didn’t distinguish /ε:/ and /e/ at all

§ as in PDE !